Arguably the iPod is the device that brought mp3 to the masses. Before it there was a morass of expensive but cheap-looking underpowered devices that didn't hold enough storage to make a significant difference between the mp3 players and a simple cassette player.
Now look around you, mp3 players are ubiquitous and the iPod has the largest market share (all models put together).
Since Apple is a legitimate company they also set up the first significant online store for music where you can actually buy mp3 tracks legally and cheaply enough instead of downloading them via some shady P2P mechanism.
The iPod is not a device reduced to its wheel, it has actually changed the way people listen to music, and also to the way music is produced and distributed. Is that significant?
Now Linus makes a lot of important decisions but there are way way more people listening to music than running a Linux box.
Disclaimer: I don't have an iPod, I don't plan to have one, I do run Linux. this is just an observation.
All well and good but many things don't work in windows if you are not an administrator.
I find it incredible that reputable developers like ID software for example require the latest demo of Doom 3 to be *installed* AND *run* as an administrator. The demo readme states this explicitely.
Yes I do know about "Run As" but what are these people thinking? Administrator is for administrative tasks, not for playing games.
No wonder XP is such a debacle area security wise.
Sounds nice, however deep drilling is hard and dangerous, and stops working past a certain temperature, way below magma temperature (the drill becomes too soft), so a hole wouldn't work.
A better solution might be to drop the waste in a very deep see trench where subduction occurs, but such areas are not well knowns for obvious reasons: danger, temperature, pressure, etc. Also subduction is slow, so we need containers that will resist the conditions of the ocean floor for long enough for them to become part of the subduction volume. AFAIK no one has yet designed a container that might fit the bill.
Maybe a combination of the proposed vitrification technique and the subduction disposal method would work? I don't know.
1- We don't have rockets or any other technology that are powerful enough to accelerate anything of significance (even a few kilos) to the orbital velocity of earth. It's about 30km/s, i.e. 3 times the escape velocity of Earth or thereabouts. Probes that went to Venus and Mercury did it using assisted gravity slingshot trajectories which are not too safe because they involve passing the Earth several times. Remember the outcry when the Cassini probe went pass the Earth the second time around with only a kilo or so of plutonium as payload?
2- We don't have enough rockets or any other technology to lift the thousands of tonnes of existing mid to high-level waste to just LEO. And then what?
3- Do you know the cost per kilo of sending something just in geostationary orbit?
4- 0.5% failure rate at liftoff, given the thousands of launches necessary, translate into tens of accidents.
Thank you, but your solution is not realistic. Certainly an old rocket will not do the trick.
Not only that but crystals become amorphous (glass) under heavy enough radiation. Quartz would not remain quartz for long enough to guarantee anything.
Well, you need to heat the compound to 3000C. The only way I can see a volume of the size of the Chernobyl reactor heated to that temperature is to nuke it.
The US went from suborbital unmanned flight to the Moon in almost exactly 10 years:
Little Joe 1 - August 21, 1959 - test of launch escape system during flight, first flight of the Mercury program.
Apollo 11 - July 20, 1969 - Landing on the Moon.
One of the most incredible and awe-inspiring achievements of the XXth century, and I'm saying this when I'm not even American. If it were started from scratch today, everyone would think it would simply be impossible.
You may say that a lot of resources were sunk into this, for sure. However large private interests have even more money than governments these days.
If I had Bill Gates' fortune this is the thing I would do. Get back to the Moon, establish a small base, restart the Orion program from there, mine the outer planets for He3, go to the stars. Would $40B be enough? I don't know. It's the most responsible thing to do if we want to survive as a species.
> (from reading a story about 3 weeks ago) that > Wikipedia is not considered an authoritative > source, ie, should not be used as a source for > scholarly works.
My post is not anywhere near scholarly work quality;-)
You can do your own research and try to nitpick what wikipedia has to say, however my post references other sources too, you can read what time.com and the Guardian have to say on Haider, so far no discrepancy.
Jeez, how hard is it to do some fact checking before posting things like that?
Haider was never PM of Austria, his party was a member of the ruling coalition though in 2000, and he is governor of the state of Carinthia. Read wikipedia entry to get some details.
Haider is an avowed anti-EU politician. In 2000 some EU member countries did impose limited diplomatic sanction on Austria. In this case this meant cancelling of visits, recall of ambassadors, etc, and had zero direct economic consequence. I.e this was a gesture of disapproval, and yes any country is entitled to do that, this is was diplomacy is all about. Israel did exactly the same BTW.
FYI Haider is a neo-Nazi revisionist. For once you'd like Europeans to do something when people like Haider get too close to actually governing a country. You remember the last time the European did nothing?
Nice double standards you've got there.
Re:Get an energy-efficient Athlon64 and run Linux_
on
Less Might Be More
·
· Score: 1
The excuse is not lame. He says Tom B. wouldn't wage war against Sauron because he wouldn't know how. What would happen is that Sauron would simply ignore Tom's tiny realm and overrun everything else. Sure Sauron wouldn't get his ring back but he wouldn't need it either, he would win over Middle-Earth just the same.
Moreover Tolkien says the ring simply has no power over Tom. This implies it doesn't grant Tom any other power that he doesn't already have, and as thing stand Tom only has power over things in his small realm.
Giving the ring to Tom would achieve exactly nothing.
Re:Get an energy-efficient Athlon64 and run Linux_
on
Less Might Be More
·
· Score: 1
This is not quite the same thing, maybe I wasn't clear. CNQ allows the processor to run at the lower speed *when idling* but I want it to run at the lower speed even when fully busy. The AMD driver doesn't allow me to do that AFAIK, but presumably it's possible with a third-party utility perhaps.
This is so that I can safely passively cool it all the time if I want.
At 1GHz with the fan off and 100% utilisation the temperature is in the high 40s.
Actually this sort of court cases have been won before, against builders of homes where people got sick in. Think houses built out of fibro-cement, which contains asbestos, or houses which simply did not follow the local building code to the letter.
I think there is a case to be made when you are forced to use an O/S due to market dominance and because of that fact you lose your data or your credit card details get divulged.
I would have thought that some kind of class action suit against Microsoft is almost inevitable when enough damages have accumulated.
Get an energy-efficient Athlon64 and run Linux_64
on
Less Might Be More
·
· Score: 1
You want power when you need it, and you want a computer that doesn't draw too much juice, stays cool and doesn't make any noise?
Get an Athlon-64. You can underclock these babies via software and on-demand. The 90W TDP guzzler turns into a 22W miser that you can passively cool, but still vastly faster than any of the VIA EPIC integrated motherboards.
You can get Micro-ATX MB for these processors, and they will fit into SFF boxes like this one. Shuttle also has a very small FF case+mobo for them but it is less silent than the Aria.
To underclock the Athlon64 under Linux 2.6 for x86_64, just do
That will set your Athlon64 2GHz to 1GHz and divide its power requirements by 4. When you need the power again do "echo 2000000" instead above. Turn the CPU fan on if you feel the need then, or get a good cooler (like a Zalman, which does fit in the case above) with a very low-speed fan that you can leave on all the time and doesn't make any noise. That's what I have and the processor never gets over 55C at full speed).
There are scripts around that will do that for you automatically depending on the load.
To me that's an almost perfect solution right now. Did I mention that these combos are really cheap? Cheaper than the VIAs.
NOTE: the above doesn't work with the newer Athlon-64 FX53, check before buying on AMD's web site.
If anyone know how to do the same trick under Windows I'd appreciate it. I'm not sure this will be possible until Win64 comes out for these processors. Linux-32 which treats the Athlon-64 like an old Athlon-XP doesn't recognize the new AMD features (it's called powernow-k8 or Cool-N-Quiet) so the stuff above only works in Linux-64, AFAIK.
No it doesn't. The functions "png" and "jpeg" do indeed depend on X11 being started, but the function "bitmap" which can produce pngs and jpegs doesn't. It relies on ghostcript instead and works perfectly on headless servers.
Do help("bitmap") for all the details.
Do try to read the man page till the end next time, or ask a question to the dev team. Both the jpeg and png man page mention the function bitmap as a solution to the problem you are having.
> but I don't see the arguments for not going to > war (other than that) and taking Hussein out of > power.
Because it is illegal in international law? Invading a country for the express purpose of regime change, however hateful, is not allowed. Think about it, if it were Canada could invade to remove Bush in all impunity (from the legal standpoint).
Since it is illegal a whole country had to be deceived into thinking that Saddam Hussein still had WMDs and that Iraq needed to be invaded *right now*, when the UN inspectors were doing their jobs, when Saddam Hussein agreed (at the last minute) to pretty much anything the US wanted except step down etc. Reports were cooked, evidence were ignored, debate was stifled under the "national security" agenda, international cooperation and goodwill was put in jeopardy. That's why.
Meanwhile the real terrorist organisation who sent plane into the WTC is still at large, currently recruiting in Iraq and elsewhere. American soldiers and now civilian are dying daily in Iraq, democratization is going nowhere, oil prices have gone up because Iraq is still not able to produce as much oil as under the old regime. The US is facing the prospect that the situation might become much worse still, and to keep spending billions of dollars into that debacle for the forseable future.
For what? for oil control and because Saddam Hussein was thumbing his nose at the Bush family. Tell that to the families of the soldiers who died in Iraq.
In case you don't know, doing something illegal in international law can make you indicted for war crimes and interned for the rest of your life. Would you like to see Bush join the Milosevics of this world?
Finally closing the borders wouldn't be very productive. Right now the low US dollar is helping the US economy to recover thanks to the lower cost of US services and products on the international market, at the expense of the Euro zone mostly.
The trouble is you can't close borders one way. If you want to be able to sell, then your clients will want you to be able to buy also. This has been worked out 50 years ago at the end of WWII with the whole GATT and now WTO stuff. Trying to undo this would simply be a disaster for the world and the US economy.
It doesn't really matter that much if the US dollar plunges, it is all very good news for exports, and at this stage the US needs a lot of exports. The shifting value of the dollar doesn't by itself affect the American economy that much especially since one of the major imports, oil, is traded in US dollars. The current shift of oil prices can be attributed to the war in Iraq which has meant little or no supply coming from the ex #2 supplier, and the booming economy in China, both factors which have driven the demand up.
In fact the low dollar is currently helping the US economy recover at the expense of mostly European nations, who are finding their own products and services less in demand because of the high Euro.
Interestingly for geeks the price of many high-tech products, which should have gone up, haven't. It is still significantly cheaper to buy computer gears etc in the US than in Europe for example. Only half of the difference in price is attributable to higher sale tax.
The other big items are food, services (medical, legal, etc) and housing, none of which depend much on the international market. Prices here have remained pretty constant as indicated by the low inflation index.
Slashdot Mirror
Insurance is only expensive if you didn't need it.
Arguably the iPod is the device that brought mp3 to the masses. Before it there was a morass of expensive but cheap-looking underpowered devices that didn't hold enough storage to make a significant difference between the mp3 players and a simple cassette player.
Now look around you, mp3 players are ubiquitous and the iPod has the largest market share (all models put together).
Since Apple is a legitimate company they also set up the first significant online store for music where you can actually buy mp3 tracks legally and cheaply enough instead of downloading them via some shady P2P mechanism.
The iPod is not a device reduced to its wheel, it has actually changed the way people listen to music, and also to the way music is produced and distributed. Is that significant?
Now Linus makes a lot of important decisions but there are way way more people listening to music than running a Linux box.
Disclaimer: I don't have an iPod, I don't plan to have one, I do run Linux. this is just an observation.
You are making a Kinq Henry the VIIIth reference
> "you are obsfucating the issue"
Obfuscating (spelling, btw), from the OED
1. trans. To cast into darkness or shadow; to cloud, obscure. a. In figurative contexts.
1536 Act 28 Hen. VIII c. 10 The..usurped auctorite of..the pope..which did obfuscate and wrest goddes holy word.
This is soo true. This was a master stroke from Gates to negociate the right to licence DOS to third parties from IBM.
The overhead of 11g is huge, I never get more than about 50% of the full bandwidth for file transfers.
A typical JPEG-compressed image on the sample gallery seems to be about 10MB, so about 5 seconds per image sounds right.
Cite references to back that statement. Many won't believe it.
All well and good but many things don't work in windows if you are not an administrator.
I find it incredible that reputable developers like ID software for example require the latest demo of Doom 3 to be *installed* AND *run* as an administrator. The demo readme states this explicitely.
Yes I do know about "Run As" but what are these people thinking? Administrator is for administrative tasks, not for playing games.
No wonder XP is such a debacle area security wise.
Sounds nice, however deep drilling is hard and dangerous, and stops working past a certain temperature, way below magma temperature (the drill becomes too soft), so a hole wouldn't work.
A better solution might be to drop the waste in a very deep see trench where subduction occurs, but such areas are not well knowns for obvious reasons: danger, temperature, pressure, etc. Also subduction is slow, so we need containers that will resist the conditions of the ocean floor for long enough for them to become part of the subduction volume. AFAIK no one has yet designed a container that might fit the bill.
Maybe a combination of the proposed vitrification technique and the subduction disposal method would work? I don't know.
1- We don't have rockets or any other technology that are powerful enough to accelerate anything of significance (even a few kilos) to the orbital velocity of earth. It's about 30km/s, i.e. 3 times the escape velocity of Earth or thereabouts. Probes that went to Venus and Mercury did it using assisted gravity slingshot trajectories which are not too safe because they involve passing the Earth several times. Remember the outcry when the Cassini probe went pass the Earth the second time around with only a kilo or so of plutonium as payload?
2- We don't have enough rockets or any other technology to lift the thousands of tonnes of existing mid to high-level waste to just LEO. And then what?
3- Do you know the cost per kilo of sending something just in geostationary orbit?
4- 0.5% failure rate at liftoff, given the thousands of launches necessary, translate into tens of accidents.
Thank you, but your solution is not realistic. Certainly an old rocket will not do the trick.
Not only that but crystals become amorphous (glass) under heavy enough radiation. Quartz would not remain quartz for long enough to guarantee anything.
Well, you need to heat the compound to 3000C. The only way I can see a volume of the size of the Chernobyl reactor heated to that temperature is to nuke it.
Would that help? I don't think so.
That's right, and an ennemy of the US remains so for at least 200,000 years, as we all know.
The US went from suborbital unmanned flight to the Moon in almost exactly 10 years:
Little Joe 1 - August 21, 1959 - test of launch escape system during flight, first flight of the Mercury program.
Apollo 11 - July 20, 1969 - Landing on the Moon.
One of the most incredible and awe-inspiring achievements of the XXth century, and I'm saying this when I'm not even American. If it were started from scratch today, everyone would think it would simply be impossible.
You may say that a lot of resources were sunk into this, for sure. However large private interests have even more money than governments these days.
If I had Bill Gates' fortune this is the thing I would do. Get back to the Moon, establish a small base, restart the Orion program from there, mine the outer planets for He3, go to the stars. Would $40B be enough? I don't know. It's the most responsible thing to do if we want to survive as a species.
Hello AC,
;-)
> (from reading a story about 3 weeks ago) that
> Wikipedia is not considered an authoritative
> source, ie, should not be used as a source for
> scholarly works.
My post is not anywhere near scholarly work quality
You can do your own research and try to nitpick what wikipedia has to say, however my post references other sources too, you can read what time.com and the Guardian have to say on Haider, so far no discrepancy.
Jeez, how hard is it to do some fact checking before posting things like that?
Haider was never PM of Austria, his party was a member of the ruling coalition though in 2000, and he is governor of the state of Carinthia. Read wikipedia entry to get some details.
Haider is an avowed anti-EU politician. In 2000 some EU member countries did impose limited diplomatic sanction on Austria. In this case this meant cancelling of visits, recall of ambassadors, etc, and had zero direct economic consequence. I.e this was a gesture of disapproval, and yes any country is entitled to do that, this is was diplomacy is all about. Israel did exactly the same BTW.
FYI Haider is a neo-Nazi revisionist. For once you'd like Europeans to do something when people like Haider get too close to actually governing a country. You remember the last time the European did nothing?
Nice double standards you've got there.
Thanks! much appreciated.
Well hopefully you have a good connection...
The excuse is not lame. He says Tom B. wouldn't wage war against Sauron because he wouldn't know how. What would happen is that Sauron would simply ignore Tom's tiny realm and overrun everything else. Sure Sauron wouldn't get his ring back but he wouldn't need it either, he would win over Middle-Earth just the same.
Moreover Tolkien says the ring simply has no power over Tom. This implies it doesn't grant Tom any other power that he doesn't already have, and as thing stand Tom only has power over things in his small realm.
Giving the ring to Tom would achieve exactly nothing.
This is not quite the same thing, maybe I wasn't clear. CNQ allows the processor to run at the lower speed *when idling* but I want it to run at the lower speed even when fully busy. The AMD driver doesn't allow me to do that AFAIK, but presumably it's possible with a third-party utility perhaps.
This is so that I can safely passively cool it all the time if I want.
At 1GHz with the fan off and 100% utilisation the temperature is in the high 40s.
Actually this sort of court cases have been won before, against builders of homes where people got sick in. Think houses built out of fibro-cement, which contains asbestos, or houses which simply did not follow the local building code to the letter.
I think there is a case to be made when you are forced to use an O/S due to market dominance and because of that fact you lose your data or your credit card details get divulged.
I would have thought that some kind of class action suit against Microsoft is almost inevitable when enough damages have accumulated.
Get an Athlon-64. You can underclock these babies via software and on-demand. The 90W TDP guzzler turns into a 22W miser that you can passively cool, but still vastly faster than any of the VIA EPIC integrated motherboards.
You can get Micro-ATX MB for these processors, and they will fit into SFF boxes like this one. Shuttle also has a very small FF case+mobo for them but it is less silent than the Aria.
To underclock the Athlon64 under Linux 2.6 for x86_64, just do(Correct the spaces due to slashcode).
That will set your Athlon64 2GHz to 1GHz and divide its power requirements by 4. When you need the power again do "echo 2000000" instead above. Turn the CPU fan on if you feel the need then, or get a good cooler (like a Zalman, which does fit in the case above) with a very low-speed fan that you can leave on all the time and doesn't make any noise. That's what I have and the processor never gets over 55C at full speed).
There are scripts around that will do that for you automatically depending on the load.
To me that's an almost perfect solution right now. Did I mention that these combos are really cheap? Cheaper than the VIAs.
NOTE: the above doesn't work with the newer Athlon-64 FX53, check before buying on AMD's web site.
If anyone know how to do the same trick under Windows I'd appreciate it. I'm not sure this will be possible until Win64 comes out for these processors. Linux-32 which treats the Athlon-64 like an old Athlon-XP doesn't recognize the new AMD features (it's called powernow-k8 or Cool-N-Quiet) so the stuff above only works in Linux-64, AFAIK.
Oil and before that any natural resource have always been more important than people, at least from the point of view of our beloved leaders:
Napoleon after a huge defeat where many men lost their lives: "A single night in Paris will replace all that".
No it doesn't. The functions "png" and "jpeg" do indeed depend on X11 being started, but the function "bitmap" which can produce pngs and jpegs doesn't. It relies on ghostcript instead and works perfectly on headless servers.
Do help("bitmap") for all the details.
Do try to read the man page till the end next time, or ask a question to the dev team. Both the jpeg and png man page mention the function bitmap as a solution to the problem you are having.
All the best.
Hi,
> but I don't see the arguments for not going to
> war (other than that) and taking Hussein out of
> power.
Because it is illegal in international law? Invading a country for the express purpose of regime change, however hateful, is not allowed. Think about it, if it were Canada could invade to remove Bush in all impunity (from the legal standpoint).
Since it is illegal a whole country had to be deceived into thinking that Saddam Hussein still had WMDs and that Iraq needed to be invaded *right now*, when the UN inspectors were doing their jobs, when Saddam Hussein agreed (at the last minute) to pretty much anything the US wanted except step down etc. Reports were cooked, evidence were ignored, debate was stifled under the "national security" agenda, international cooperation and goodwill was put in jeopardy. That's why.
Meanwhile the real terrorist organisation who sent plane into the WTC is still at large, currently recruiting in Iraq and elsewhere. American soldiers and now civilian are dying daily in Iraq, democratization is going nowhere, oil prices have gone up because Iraq is still not able to produce as much oil as under the old regime. The US is facing the prospect that the situation might become much worse still, and to keep spending billions of dollars into that debacle for the forseable future.
For what? for oil control and because Saddam Hussein was thumbing his nose at the Bush family. Tell that to the families of the soldiers who died in Iraq.
In case you don't know, doing something illegal in international law can make you indicted for war crimes and interned for the rest of your life. Would you like to see Bush join the Milosevics of this world?
Finally closing the borders wouldn't be very productive. Right now the low US dollar is helping the US economy to recover thanks to the lower cost of US services and products on the international market, at the expense of the Euro zone mostly.
The trouble is you can't close borders one way. If you want to be able to sell, then your clients will want you to be able to buy also. This has been worked out 50 years ago at the end of WWII with the whole GATT and now WTO stuff. Trying to undo this would simply be a disaster for the world and the US economy.
Hello,
It doesn't really matter that much if the US dollar plunges, it is all very good news for exports, and at this stage the US needs a lot of exports. The shifting value of the dollar doesn't by itself affect the American economy that much especially since one of the major imports, oil, is traded in US dollars. The current shift of oil prices can be attributed to the war in Iraq which has meant little or no supply coming from the ex #2 supplier, and the booming economy in China, both factors which have driven the demand up.
In fact the low dollar is currently helping the US economy recover at the expense of mostly European nations, who are finding their own products and services less in demand because of the high Euro.
Interestingly for geeks the price of many high-tech products, which should have gone up, haven't. It is still significantly cheaper to buy computer gears etc in the US than in Europe for example. Only half of the difference in price is attributable to higher sale tax.
The other big items are food, services (medical, legal, etc) and housing, none of which depend much on the international market. Prices here have remained pretty constant as indicated by the low inflation index.
So no, salaries haven't been slaughtered.